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Under-the-Radar Round Up 2013, Part 3
Original Reviews by Jonathan Broxton
I’m pleased to present the third installment in my on-going series of articles looking at the best under-the-radar scores from around the world.
This article, the third of 2013, explores eight outstanding scores from recent months, including a Polish science fiction comedy about a young couple who discover a time-travelling elevator and find themselves face-to-face with Adolf Hitler, a biographical drama about celebrated Polish poet and wartime resistance fighter Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński, a hugely popular Polish television series following a group of friends struggling to survive in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, a Russian biographical drama telling the story of pioneering cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and his historic journey into space, a nature documentary about brown bears living in the Carpathian Mountains, a Polish family drama about two teenage girls who discover that they are twin sisters separated at birth, an epic historical drama about a Polish family deported to Siberia during World War II, and Roman Polanski’s French-Polish adaptation of Venus in Fur, an erotic comedy-drama about the shifting balance of power between a theater director and an actress during an unusual audition.
AMBASSADA – Bartosz Chajdecki
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Ambassada is a Polish science fiction comedy film written and directed by Juliusz Machulski, about a young couple who move into a new apartment building, only to find that the building’s elevator is actually a time machine; using the machine, the couple find themselves going back in time to the 1940s and coming face-to-face with none other than Adolf Hitler! Yes, it is a comedy – it stars Magdalena Grąziowska, Bartosz Porczyk and Robert Więckiewicz, and has a score by one of the young rising stars of Polish film music, Bartosz Chajdecki.
The score is an interesting mix of contemporary jazz and large-scale science fiction action, which sounds like it shouldn’t work at all, but actually does. The opening cue, “Kosmopolityczny-Wood” introduces the Cosmopolitan theme, a fun piece of jazz, with a bouncy trumpet line offset by an accordion, piano and stand-up bass, which introduces the main characters and their deft comedic natures. “Żydowski Szybki” brings a hint of Jewish-Polish folk music into the score with a whirligig dance for harpsichord and strings, while “Woln Spokój”, “Holly” and the flamboyant finale “Nalewki Zmontowane“ return later in the score to revisit the jazz flavors of the opening cue. Read more…
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